Abstract
We investigate the use of a timing synchronization technique within cooperative multi-hop networks with and without direct transmission between the source and destination nodes. In particular, we employ a parallel interference cancellation (PIC) technique to combat the effect of timing misalignment of the received signal at both the relay and the destination nodes. We compare the advantage in using direct transmission (DT) to assist in reducing the end-to-end bit-error-rate (BER) at the receiver with using multiple level cooperation among all nodes of each hop without direct transmission. Using 8-PSK constellation signals, our simulation results show that increased cooperation among neighboring nodes delivers improved end-to-end BER as compared to direct transmission assisted cooperation.